


Don't Fear the (Grimm) Reaper

by Curlscat



Category: The Sisters Grimm - Michael Buckley
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Body Horror, F/M, it's not gore but it's not pleasant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:08:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29368275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Curlscat/pseuds/Curlscat
Summary: The Grimms are ghosts "detectives," solving crimes committed by the unquiet dead, in a town where everyone who dies becomes a ghost. Their newest problem? The dead have been re-embodied. Nobody's happy about this. As tensions rise between the people who should and shouldn't be alive, Sabrina struggles to figure out what being a medium means in a town where ghosts are suddenly gone. Can they fix this?Also Puck's a poltergeist and he's not happy about being solid.
Relationships: Daphne Grimm & Sabrina Grimm, Puck Goodfellow/Sabrina Grimm
Comments: 9
Kudos: 16





	Don't Fear the (Grimm) Reaper

**Author's Note:**

> This was SUPPOSED to be a Halloween fic... WHOOPS. It was also supposed to be either spooky or funny and instead it landed somewhere around mournful.
> 
> For context: it's an AU where, up until the beginning of the fic, everything has proceeded much as in canon, only people are ghosts instead of everafters. So things have shifted a little bit, but not a lot.

Ghosts are only scary the first dozen or so times you see them. Or at least, this has been Sabrina’s experience.

In the six months that she’s lived with her grandmother, she’s run the gamut of ghosts, and she thinks she’s getting a handle on this sort of thing. When your grandma is the latest in a long line of psychics in a town where the dead don’t stay dead, you have to learn on your feet. And that’s what Ferryport Landing is: a town where the dead stick around whether they want to or not. A town where ghosts cause trouble and you need someone who can see them to clean up the messes. A town full of ghosts and who knows what else. 

Sabrina and Daphne were raised out in the normal world, and they’ve been thrown into it since their parent’s most-likely-supernatural deaths, with a brief and terrible detour in the foster system. In that time, Sabrina’s dealt with demons, abominations, death omens, poltergeists, and even possession (finding out you’re a medium isn’t all it’s cracked up to be). She’s getting to be old hat at this.

None of that has prepared her for what she’s facing now.

She reaches out and pokes Puck in the arm again. He’s still solid.

Sabrina and Daphne were eating a typically strange breakfast this morning of quail eggs and something that purported to be sausage. Then Puck fell off the ceiling onto Sabrina’s lap, breaking the table and sending gravy all over the room in the process. He shouldn’t have done any of that, partly because, as a poltergeist, he was an insubstantial thought form made of mischief and not much else, so gravity should not work on him, and partly because for ghosts, affecting physical objects requires a fair amount of concentration and effort, and falling is usually done without effort.

Then, also, there was the fact that ghosts, poltergeists, tulpas, and other such creatures that are more mental than physical? They should not,  _ ever _ be solid.

“Stop doing that,” Puck snaps, swatting at Sabrina’s hand as she pokes him.

“Go back to being insubstantial and I will,” Sabrina says.

“I’d love to!” is Puck’s rejoinder, and he throws his hands up in the air. “It’s been two hours and I’ve already fallen over six times! How do you live people deal with gravity?”

“We’re used to it,” Daphne says. “Don’t you remember? I mean I know you’ve been around a while, but—”

“I’ve never been alive,” Puck mutters.

“You haven’t?” Sabrina asks. She’s not sure why she’s surprised, but she is.

“No,” Puck says. “I’m not a  _ ghost _ , I’m a  _ poltergeist _ . I’ve _ told _ you there’s a difference.”

“I thought you were just being… I dunno. ‘Oh look at me I’m so special.’” Sabrina scuffs her feet on the floor, making a face. She feels kind of bad, but in her defense, Puck does that kind of thing a lot.

“No,” Puck says, and nothing else. It’s enough. It’s heavy.

* * *

Of course it comes back to Bunny. Everything comes back to the Necromancers, but more than that, everything comes back to Bunny Lancaster. Bunny the first Necromancer to come to Ferryport Landing, Bunny the one who knows all the ghosts, Bunny who brought the first ghost to this stupid town where they’re all tied.

Sabrina’s a little fuzzy on the details, still, but she’s not surprised to hear that her grandmother, Baba Yaga, and Bunny are currently having a counsel of war in the other room.

“Apparently it’s everybody,” Puck says gloomily, gesturing at his solid form. “All the ghosts, all the spirits, everyone. All the incorporeal human energies.” This last is said with the mimicking tone of someone who’s being overly politically correct about their own group, the way Uncle Jake says “LGBTQIAPN plus” sometimes.

Everybody. Not just Puck. Snow, and Charming, and Sabrina’s private friend The Dark Mirror, and somewhere, maybe, Sabrina’s parents, the only ghosts she’s never been able to see or hear.

“Huh,” Sabrina says. She looks at Puck and Daphne, who are giving her expectant looks from where they’ve dragged her in the front hall, before the dining room door where the council of war is being held.

Normally, Puck would already be in the other room, listening in on the conversation, poking his head back through the wall every now and again to tell Sabrina and Daphne what the adults were talking about. Things aren’t normal, today, though. So it’s going to have to be Sabrina, isn’t it? She used to be pretty good at listening in on adult conversations. She hopes she hasn’t gotten out of practice.

So she squats next to the door with a cup, presses it gently to the door so it doesn’t make a  _ tink _ as it hits, leans in until the cup is trapped between her ear and the door. Keeps an eye on the chink of light under the door so she can tell if anyone’s coming to open it.

“What are they talking about?” Daphne demands.

“Shh!” Sabrina hisses.

This is what she hears:

A long time ago, at the beginning of the beginning, Necromancers, Mediums, and Psychics were just considered “witches,” and they were hunted down. This, she already knew. The Grimms weren’t involved, yet, though there was a strong predilection for them to be Mediums. Involved were: Bunny Lancaster, she who would have been a queen had she not been outed as a Necromancer. Snow Lancaster, her daughter, engaged to be married to a rich man in the colonies who knew nothing of her mother’s sordid history. Atticus Charming, the future husband. Baba Yaga, the witch of the woods in this little town.

Atticus was terrible. Abusive. A killer. And when Snow would not bow to him in all things, and furthermore, when he saw the way his new wife and younger brother looked at each other, he killed her.

Bunny could not, would not, live in a world without her daughter. Any other woman would have killed herself, perhaps taken her daughter’s killer with her. But Bunny was not any other woman. Bunny was one of the most powerful Necromancers of the sixteenth century, and she was determined to bring her daughter back.

Something went wrong, though, in tying Snow’s spirit to this plane of existence. Because Bunny required a sacrifice, and the sacrifice she chose was, of course, her daughter’s murderer. But Atticus would not go quietly. He fought Bunny every step of the way, and Ferryport turned into a battle of wills among two furious beings.

When the ritual began to go wrong, everyone with even a hint of awareness of the other side knew. They all came running, trying to stop or contain it. For most of them, it was their downfall. Atticus, in his desperate bid to stay alive, dragged them into himself, psychically, until all that was left of them was empty shells. The first of the Jabberwock victims, before it even had a name.

Only Baba Yaga and Wilhelm Grimm had come prepared enough to withstand the onslaught, and only they remained, watching as Bunny and Atticus pulled, and pulled, and pulled at every scrap of human psyche they could get their hands on, ripping it, warping the fabric of the world around them.

Something had to be done.

So they did it. They started stitching the wall between this side and the other back down, started tying people’s souls to their bodies as much as possible. It could always be undone later, but right now the goal was to stop this damage before it grew. To contain it.

When they were done, Ferryport Landing was different. The wall between the world of the dead and the world of the living was too solid. Nobody could pass through. And nobody could figure out how to undo it.

And so it has stayed in Ferryport Landing for centuries. The unquiet dead from elsewhere migrating as they heard of a place where other dead lived. Of course, there was the Jabberwock, only contained by the power of the Necromancers, and the fact that their containment ended up accidentally trapping all the other ghosts here with it. But it was good to know you could be heard, good to have company. So they came.

And now?

Well, one of Bunny’s other pet projects has gotten loose. Necromancers don’t have to stop work once they’re dead, after all, and Bunny has been trying to figure out a way to break through to the other side, it would seem, since she got herself locked on the wrong plane of existence.

She’s been communicating with some sort of—something. Something like Puck, from the sound of things. Something that was never alive, was born out of excess energy. But instead of being born from children’s mischief, he was born of some sort of darkness. Bunny was hoping that if she fed him long enough, he could burst through the cracks, rip out some of the ‘stay here’ that Baba Yaga and Jacob Grimm darned into the seams of Ferryport Landing.

(Sabrina will not tell the others this, but she knows who this is, when Bunny says his name. Mirror. Her very own Dark Mirror, her friend, the one who knew her and listened to her and comforted her, the one who told her he understood her. And it turns out he was using her, feeding off her. She shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s still heartbreaking in a way that she can’t quite deal with right now.)

But he’d wanted something different. He’d wanted to be able to live himself, to exist, to know what it was like to be solid and here and present like a person. So he’d twisted what Bunny was trying to do, taken her energy and stored it, and used it to pull himself from psychic to solid. And brought everyone else with him.

Sabrina relays all of this to Puck and Daphne, who have been waiting with various degrees of impatience.

“Great,” Puck grumbles. “I have to be solid just because somebody else wanted to have a  _ body _ .”

“So what are we going to do about it?” Daphne asks.

Sabrina has absolutely no idea.

* * *

Puck looks  _ weird _ , solid. Not human, still. Puck was never human, he was always a poltergeist, always something not quite ghost, just a the manifestation of all the trouble children cause. So now that he’s solid, he’s still got the pointed ears and the sharp teeth and the fingers that end in claws. He just also has brilliant green eyes that shimmer in the light, and freckles spattered like spilled paint on his ruddy cheeks, and golden curls that cast shadows on his face.

He looks like someone’s long-ago ideal of impish boyhood. Like someone dressed a Victorian Christmas card in a dirty hoodie and ragged jeans.

It shouldn’t be attractive.

And look, Sabrina didn’t have to worry about this before, right? So she was having  _ feelings _ in Puck’s direction. It wasn’t like anything was going to happen or anything. They’d been doomed before they got started. He wasn’t solid, he wasn’t going to get older. She’d grow out of him, eventually. Grow up and move on to someone who could hold her hand, run their fingers through her hair, wrestle her for the good pillow.

All in all, not a bad choice for a first crush. She had concerns about her own taste, but really? Not bad. She wasn’t going to get her heart broken, they wouldn’t start dating and go too far too fast and regret it. She could moon over him in peace if she wanted to with absolutely no consequences.

Only now he’s solid, and yesterday he winked at her and she wanted to punch him and kiss him and she still doesn’t know if he’s going to stay a weird troublemaking kid forever but now if she wanted to she could  _ touch him _ and that’s just… too much to think about.

Everyone’s been solid for over a week, now, and it’s been absolute chaos. Right now, though, all Sabrina can focus on is Puck, feet firmly on the ground, arguing with someone who should be dead and wants, now that she’s got a body again, to destroy her husband’s new wife. Puck’s trying to talk her out of hunting down the Jabberwock and feeding her romantic rival to it.

And Sabrina’s having  _ feelings _ .

Really, she needs to get her priorities in order.

* * *

Aside from the whole mess that is the dead walking the earth again in heavy shoes, what’s really got most of the People Who Know worried, it seems, is the Jabberwock.

Sabrina, Daphne, and Puck learn most of this through listening at keyholes and open windows, through sitting so still and quiet the adults forget they’re in the room, and through asking pointedly innocent questions. They already knew about the Jabberwock. They even knew it killed Grandpa Basil, knew that he was one of the only people to die in town who was truly lost.

What they don’t know, and what nobody else seem to know, either, is where the Jabberwock is now.

It has to be somewhere, of course. Everything has to be somewhere. And the bonds put to keep it in check won’t work as well now that it’s (probably) solid again. And even though nobody’s seen it, they all think it has to be solid, because Puck is solid, so even though the Jabberwock isn’t really a ghost in the most traditional sense, it’s still governed by the same rules. Still made out of psychic energy, just like all the other revenants.

So that’s the situation everyone’s dealing with. Granny and Unce Jake seem like they’re having kind of a hard time with it, because of course they are, because this family doesn’t  _ talk _ about things, they just sit in their feelings and hope they go away, so nobody has to say “I got your husband killed and I know you haven’t forgiven me for it but if it makes you feel any better I haven’t forgiven me either,” or “I hate that my parents left this town because even if I sort of got a normal childhood out of it, it means when they died I lost them forever.”

Between the worries about the Jabberwock, and the buried, unspoken grief of it, there’s all the worrying about the brewing fury in town between the living and the not-supposed-to-be-living, between the revenants and each other, all this pent-up rage at the wrongness of this town and the still being trapped, and the old wounds that can now be avenged because they can  _ touch _ each other again.

And of course, there’s talk about whether or not this can be remedied. Bunny has explained, in ways Sabrina has trouble understanding, what the basics of her plan with Mirror were. She says he knew more about it than she did, but it made sense. The idea that with enough energy, things could be righted. The problem, of course, is getting this energy. So the adults are still searching.

Between it all, Sabrina and Daphne and Puck float aimlessly, trying to help (or, in Puck’s case, hamper) and being largely ignored. It’s like a limbo of its own, and Sabrina hates every second of it.

* * *

“We’re never going to fix this, are we?” Daphne asks. It’s the most depressed Sabrina’s sister has ever sounded.

“Sure we are,” Puck says, elbowing Daphne in the shoulder with a grin. It only barely looks forced. “You think yours truly is going to go through life without flying again?”

Daphne looks over the scene in front of them, doubtful.

Sabrina kind of agrees with Daphne. It’s too late. This town is never going to be normal, and every single thing someone does here just adds to the terrible jenga tower of mistakes.

They’re halfway up Mount Taurus, looking down at a scene of absolute chaos. A fight’s broken out, a pretty terrible one, and Sabrina, Puck, and Daphne ran up the mountain to try to escape. Nobody can die, of course, so they’re just moving like zombies in bodies that shouldn’t work any longer, bodies that are bent the wrong ways. Sabrina doesn’t even know why they’re fighting. Probably they don’t either. Probably it’s just about fear, and fury, and knowing there’s no consequences except paint.

She knows a lot of them. Snow’s down there. Mr. Canis, Granny’s favorite ghost. Charming. Their uncle.

“It’s gonna be this, forever,” Daphne says. “And we’re never going to find out if our parents stayed here or moved on or what.”

Sabrina has always believed her parents moved on. She might not have known she could see ghosts when they disappeared, but if her parents were out there, if they were ghosts, she’d have seen them.

“H-hello?”

Sabrina spins around like she’s heard a shot go of, she’s so shocked. There’s a girl in the woods, a girl in a ratty red sweater that’s so long it almost looks like a dress, the sleeves pushed up to show her hands underneath it. She looks about Daphne’s age.

“Who are you?” Sabrina demands.

“I… um, Red,” the girl says.

Convenient.

“Hi, Red,” Daphne says. “What are you doing out here by yourself?”

“We’re out here by ourselves,” Sabrina points out, because Daphne sounds like she’s talking to a toddler.

“You’ve got me with you,” Puck says brightly. “That’s not by yourselves.”

Sabrina rolls her eyes. Puck might be millenia old, might be the oldest known poltergeist, but he doesn’t count as  _ supervision _ , not by a long shot.

“I— my kitty’s—” the girl says. “My kitty changed. It’s scaring me.”

“Your what?” Sabrina says.

Daphne holds out her hand. “Do you know where your parents are?”

“Gone,” the girl says. Tentatively, she takes Daphne’s hand.

Great. Obviously Daphne’s decided to adopt this kid.

“C’mon,” Daphne says. “Let’s go find my grandma. She’ll help find your parents, okay?”

“Okay,” the girl says.

Daphne and the girl start down the mountain, Daphne quizzing the girl, the girl giving absolutely useless answers.

Sabrina rolls her eyes, but follows after, more slowly.

“Hey,” Puck says, crunching loudly as he catches up to her. “Hold up a minute, okay?”

“I— sure,” Sabrina says. She stops, looks at Puck expectantly.

Puck doesn’t say anything. He just scuffs his feet in the downed leaves, looks up at the sky, gray through the empty tree branches.

“Well?” Sabrina asks.

“I just—” Puck starts, stops. “I dunno. I haven’t. You’ve been busy. With Daphne, or with your grandma. I wanted to—I don’t know.”

“You don’t get to see enough of me if I can lock a door between us?” Sabrina asks wryly, but there’s no bite to it.

“I guess,” Puck mutters. “I just—listen. If your sister’s right. If we can’t—if I’m stuck like this.”

Sabrina waits, leaning back against the tree behind her. Puck’ll get it out eventually. He rarely has trouble getting his words out.

“I’m glad,” he says, and he’s making eye contact now. “That it happened now. While you’re. I’m glad that if I’m gonna. That it’s at the same time as you.”

Oh.

“I—” Sabrina starts, then realizes she has no idea how to finish that. She’s definitely blushing. “I guess—I mean—I—”

“It’s fine,” Puck says. He’s not looking at her anymore. “This was stupid. You were always gonna outgrow me, I guess. I just thought maybe—never mind.”

“No,” Sabrina says in a rush. “No, no, you’re not—I just—I didn’t think. I thought—I didn’t think poltergeists  _ got _ —I didn’t think you’d feel like that.”  _ Not about me, _ she doesn’t say.

“Yeah, well,” Puck mutters. He kicks at some more leaves. “Me neither. But I mean you were a lot of fun before all this happened, and—I dunno. Everything’s different now. Things even  _ look _ different. And I guess. I mean. I dunno if. If we can fix this. I might not, y’know, still feel this way. But. I mean. It’s not so bad, if you’re here, y’know?”

She does know, actually, stupid as that is. She knows, and she gets it, and she’s glad she’s got this chance to—to keep him. 

“Yeah,” she says. Her mouth is dry, so she swallows. “Yeah, no, I think I get it. I—when you’re not being a jerk, you’re pretty, um. Pretty great.”

“Yeah?” Puck asks. He’s starting to smile that big cherub grin.

“I—yeah,” Sabrina says. Now she’s the one who can’t meet his eyes. “I mean. I still wanna fix it, if we can. But. If we can’t. At least there’s this?”

“Yeah,” Puck agrees, and she can  _ hear _ him grinning.

She feels something against her hand, and when she looks, she sees that it’s Puck’s hand, pointed claw-fingers and all. He’s trying to hold her hand. She lets him. It’s nice. Warm. And it doesn’t hurt, the claws, like she thought it would. It feels tingly, like she always heard about in books. Full of energy, of potential.

They make their way down the mountain slowly. There’s only one trail, so they don’t have to keep up with Daphne and her new pet project all that closely. They can take their time, enjoy a little bit of being alone together with this new thing between them, out in the open.

And then of course, it all turns terrible.

It starts with a crashing noise in the forest behind them, and then Sabrina is turning around so slowly, too slowly, and Puck is turning too, and then he’s shoving her backward, because in front of her is something too big to comprehend, too monstrous, all teeth and claws and scales and every once in a while a face that pushes, malformed, out of the enormous form in front of her only to get swallowed up again, and it’s coming for them, rushing at Puck, who’s stood tall and straight and more human than he’s ever looked, more fragile, in front of it: the Jabberwock. Coming for them.

It’s solid, now, too, because of course it is, because of course it’s turned into an absolutely terrible present form along with everyone else, and Sabrina could forgive Mirror the chaos, but she will never ever forgive him for taking a monster made of ghosts and turning it into a real, true monster that’s storming through the woods, that is going to kill Puck.

It reaches and enormous clawed hand for Puck, and picks him up, looks at him thoughtfully, as if it’s confused that he’s still there. Because of course it is. Normally a touch would be enough to consume Puck. But now that it’s a revenant, the rules are different.

Which means there’s still time.

Sabrina is an idiot, she will think to herself later, because instead of running down the mountain,  _ thanks for the romantic sacrifice Puck the relationship was nice while it lasted _ , the way she should be going, she’s grabbing a stick from the woods beside the trail and she’s running for the enormous monster with nothing but a branch as thick around as her wrist, and she’s screaming a war cry and trying to thrust the stick into the Jabberwock’s skin. She won’t be able to kill it, of course, because nothing here can die, but she can maybe get Puck free, can get them far enough away to count as something like safe.

The stick scrapes off scales without doing any damage. The Jabberwock doesn’t even look at her, still cocking its head at Puck in confusion.

Sabrina screams again, and claws at the thing, trying to rip one of its scales out.

When she touches it, something happens.

Normally, when Sabrina touched a ghost, before, it used to feel like this: cold, then very very warm, then like she was tuning in to a radio that only she could hear, like the radio was her head and this was someone else’s frequency. Then there was the option to pull, to invite the ghost into her head, to let it possess her, use her for a little bit. Or to shove.

This is like that, and very much not like it. Instead of a radio, it’s like a TV: she has touched it and flickered it on, images and sounds and static and  _ so much _ and not enough, and certainly no making sense of it or choosing to push or pull. There is only experiencing it.

This should not be possible. This is not a ghost, this is a solid body. Sabrina can’t do this with live people. It didn’t happen with Puck.

Still, you work with what you have. So Sabrina pulls. She yanks at the Jabberwock, grabbing for its attention, at its very self, pulls and pulls and drags and keeps pulling until it  _ lets. Puck. Go. _

* * *

Sabrina is full of someone else’s energy. She is bursting out the seams with the unquiet dead, the dead who have been dead so long they’ve forgotten what they were before they died. Her cup runneth over. Her cup is her body, herself.

Most of them have forgotten what they once were, and they are just energy, just all of what used to be the Jabberwock, all those who were consumed and subsumed, all that she pulled out of it to save Puck and herself. Every once in a while a memory will surface, will try to force itself on Sabrina, but they’re so tangled it’s easy to see through them, even if it’s not easy to push them aside.

She isn’t sure if Puck is all right. The last she saw, he’d collapsed to the ground, dropped by a being who shouldn’t  _ be _ anymore, a being who’s turned into nothing but a very confused-looking man. She couldn’t stop to check on him, though, because if she stopped, she’d let something loose, or maybe she’d accidentally pull Puck into herself the way she absorbed the Jabberwock.

She keeps walking. She knows where she’s going, how to get there. Knows who she’s seeking, can feel him like she’s a compass and he’s magnetic north. It’s Mirror, Bunny’s shadow-man, who pretended to be Sabrina’s friend.

She is walking to him, and when she gets there, she will make him fix this.

* * *

“Mirror!” Sabrina calls out when she makes it to the place where she can feel him, which mostly looks like an ordinary stretch of empty November woods. Her voice is too loud, too much, echoing, carrying a hundred other voices inside it, buoyed on them, rippling with them.

“Sabrina,” says the being who fed on Sabrina’s pain for over a year, with a bright smile. “I’ve been expecting you.”

Sabrina does not tell him where he can shove his peppy attitude, but it’s a near thing, only held in because talking is difficult when she has to focus on holding herself together.

Instead, she plants her feet and holds her hands loose at her sides, less than ten feet away from his smug face, and she watches him. Let him make the first move.

His solid form is nothing like his spiritual form. Puck transformed directly from his ordinary translucent self into a more solid version of the same thing. Mirror, though, was enormous, before. Terrifying to look at, until he started to talk to you, when he sounded just kind of like a normal man, gentling you into trusting him with all the worst parts of yourself. Now he’s a short, balding middle-aged guy, soft around the middle. He looks like the platonic ideal of an accountant.

When Mirror doesn’t move, and it becomes apparent that this is going to be a pretty boring face-off, Sabrina says, “You were supposed to let them through.”

Mirror just shrugs. “And then what happened? What if it made a vortex, unplugging that drain, and I got sucked through, too? I’m not a soul, Sabrina. I won’t survive on the other side.”

“So instead you make things worse,” Sabrina says. “How many other spirits did you force into humanity, just because you wanted to try out a body? How many afterlives have you ruined? Have you paid attention to how chaotic this town has gotten since you decided to drag everyone into being revenants?”

Mirror shrugs again, gives Sabrina a smile. “When was I ever going to get another opportunity like this? It’s not my fault the psychic energy in this town is so tangled up that I couldn’t just transform me. This was my only option.”

Sabrina doesn’t have time for this. She’s going to burst into a monster of her own if she doesn’t get Mirror to tell her how to break through the veil soon. She can’t have a conversation about ethics, about how every problem this stupid town’s psychic network has had comes from people being too caught up in their own issues to consider the ramifications of their actions. Can’t debate the needs of the many over the needs of the few with someone who won’t listen.

“How do I fix it?” she asks instead.

Mirror laughs and says, “I doubt you could. The energy alone has taken me over a century to collect.”

And—oh. Mirror doesn’t—can’t he tell? Doesn’t he know? Can’t he see everything she’s holding?

She remembers Puck complaining about how different human eyes are than his poltergeist ones were. She’d written it off as just being the difference between ground perspective and sky perspective, and as the unfortunate impassibility of walls for solid bodies, but maybe it was something else, too. Maybe Mirror and Puck are too human, now, to see the other side of things.

“I can,” she says. And then—

She lets a little of the energy she’s holding out, a little of the Jabberwock-that-was. It bursts out of her skin for a second, a hideous, terrible mass of scales that bulges out of her arms and back down again like a glitch in a video game or a bubble in boiling custard.

Mirror jumps back in horror, eyes wide, hand on his newly-formed heart.

“All I need is to know how,” Sabrina says. “That’s it. You can do whatever you want with your life, I just need to know how to do it. You had to be able to convince Bunny you knew what you were doing.”

“No,” Mirror says.

What? “Why not?” Sabrina demands.

“What if I get sucked through?” Mirror points out. “I’m not risking that just so you can try to ‘right the natural order’ or something high minded like that.”

“Mirror,” Sabrina says.

“No,” Mirror repeats, more forceful.

Then Sabrina will have to rip it out of him. She can still get possessed by a revenant, she knows that, she’s full of revenant energy right now. So she will. If she’s careful, she can do it without actually killing him. And she’s gotten good at this medium business. Even Granny says so.

She surges forward without giving Mirror any warning, two years of being a terrible menace and escape artist in the foster system and a year dodging projectiles thrown by angry ghosts leaving her fast and furious and determined. Before he has time to react, she’s got her arms around his knees, is digging her hand into the gap between his pants and sock to touch bare skin, has  _ found _ it, is pulling, digging for the part of Mirror that knows how to  _ fix this _ .

He resists, of course. She may have had the element of surprise, but now that he’s caught up, he’s fighting her at every turn. Kicking, trying to run away, putting up mental barriers and false flags, falling hard into the dirt with the force of a kick that Sabrina held on through, rolling in the leaves as Sabrina hunts for her answers.

Sabrina’s grip is strong, though, and even though he’s gotten some good hits on her ribs, she’s still clung tight to him, still got her furious hold on his ankle, is still trying to sort through his thoughts, picking up and discarding bits of energy until—

There it is.

Sabrina burrows into the thought, pulls at it as gently as she can with Mirror thrashing at her, works to understand it and hold on and keep a handle on all the souls swirling inside her all at the same time, all the while trying to keep from letting Mirror get dragged into the gravity well of psychic energy she’s holding in her chest—

And then—

Finally—

She understands.

And it’s easy, now, isn’t it? To twist everything inside her, to let it spin, let herself spin, let Mirror kick her off in an arc because she doesn’t need anything else from him, and to keep spinning, to turn all of the no-longer-people she’s holding inside herself into a twisting point like the head of an enormous intangible drill, and to seek out just a few of those artificial threads on the weft of Ferryport Landing. To sever them.

Every thread takes so much soul energy out of her, empties her out a little bit more, and she would feel bad if there were anything left of these people, but they’re not people anymore, they’re miserable psychic soup, and one of them was her grandfather but there’s no saving him, he would approve of this, she knows that, at least this way they’ll be at peace, a little, as she tears at the bindings her ancestor put on this town, undoes this mistake born out of trying to fix another mistake.

She keeps going, because there are so may threads, pulls and pulls and tears and cuts and feels herself get caught up in the spiral, knows that she is going to get dragged in with it, until—

* * *

She wakes up who knows how long later, and she’s mostly certain that she shouldn’t be alive. Other than that, who knows? She’s present. She’s—uncomfortable. Wet. In pain.

She opens her eyes.

In front of her is a girl with black hair and brown eyes in a round, brown face. She looks worried. She looks sad.

She looks familiar.

“Daphne?”

The girl in front of her, who is Daphne, who is—her sister, who is the most important person in her life, who she almost forgot? That girl. She throws her arms around Sabrina (because that’s who she is. She’s Sabrina Grimm) and starts bawling.

Through the mess of tears, Sabrina can make out a few key points in Daphne’s babble: everyone could feel what was happening, Mirror has amnesia, Sabrina almost died. Daphne was only barely able to hold her to this plane of existence. Sabrina should never, ever do something like this again without warning.

Sabrina, once she can manage the energy, pushes her sister back, says, “Puck—what about Puck? He was—”

“Hey,” Puck says.

Oh, that beautiful, smug voice. Sabrina peers around Daphne’s braids, which are exploding into messy frizz, and sees Puck. He’s leaning casually against a tree, with a man wandering absently behind him, touching trees with wonder. He’s fine. He’s alive. He’s here. He’s—Oh, thank God in heaven he’s fine he’s alive.

“Who’s that?” Sabrina asks.

“This?” Puck says, cocking a thumb at the man. “Near as I can tell, he’s Atticus.”

“I thought I—” Sabrina says, then stops, feeling around inside her head, searching through half-remembered other people. They usually leave her with echoes of themselves. And she could have sworn—

“It didn’t kill him, I guess,” Puck says. “Just sort of. I dunno. Emptied him?”

“Factory reset,” Daphne confirms, which clarifies nothing.

“What?” Sabrina asks. Maybe they’re making sense, and Sabrina is just. Very out of it?

“You  _ took _ everything,” Daphne says. “All the stuff that made him him, all the stuff that made him a monster? You took it, and you put it somewhere.”

“Oh,” Sabrina says. “Yeah. I, uh. I guess I used it? To sort of. Um. Undo the whole mess? Or I tried to, anyway. Dunno if it worked.”

Daphne’s eyes narrow, and she smacks Sabrina in the arm, hard. “You idiot! You could’ve  _ died _ ! What were you thinking?”

“Sorry,” Sabrina says. She doesn’t tell her sister she would’ve probably died anyway, that Puck definitely would’ve died. Daphne can figure that part out on her own, and she’s too tired to argue with her sister.

“Oh, hey, old lady!” Puck crows, which sort of means Sabrina can’t say anything anyway.

Because now it has to be explanations. It has to be “ _ lieblings _ , what happened?” and “we felt that all the way across town” and “someone  _ died _ ” and “wait, like actually died?” and “yes, really and truly died” and “I killed someone” and Uncle Jake looking at his hands like he can’t believe it and staring into the distance and shaking a little bit and half explanations tumbling out over top of each other and nobody making sense and everyone wanting to know what happened without stopping to listen.

Eventually, after far longer than it would have taken if they’d all sat down and just given their stories in a way that makes sense instead of demanding answers and then not waiting to hear them, it comes out.

People can move on to the next thing, now, but it seems like it has to be a Grimm who sends them. They’ve learned this from the impromptu and very unethical experiment that was the battle Sabrina vaguely remembers. It what was probably only an hour or two ago but feels like years and years ago in her mind. Uncle Jake was involved in it, because of course he was. And he killed someone. And they died. And he doesn’t look like he’ll recover from it for a long time. But nobody else could do it, no matter how hard they tried.

Mirror and Atticus will be dealt with. And Granny, Baba Yaga, and Bunny are already talking about plans to help those who want to move on to the next thing.

It would also seem that there can be ghosts again, because there were live people mixed up in that battle, and they very suddenly found that they were no longer inside their broken bodies.

So. Sabrina didn’t fix it. She didn’t even come close to fixing it.

But she maybe stopped the way Ferryport Landing was festering. She maybe made people see reason, reminded them that this mob rule is impossible, untenable, causing nothing but pain.

Baba Yaga and Bunny are already talking about sending someone out to test and see if they’re all stuck in Ferryport Landing. Granny and Daphne are fawning over the strange new girl, trying to get a story out of her that makes sense. Uncle Jake, still shaking, has visibly steeled himself, and is talking to the empty men who used to be Mirror and Atticus.

Sabrina is so tired, and it doesn’t seem like any of them need her. She lies down in the leaves, because she’s already filthy and damp, what’s a little more dirt and wet?

A shadow covers her face, and she opens her eyes to look at Puck.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she says.

He offers her a hand. Sabrina almost reaches up to take it, to lever herself up to sitting, but stops before they touch. Because—

What if—

She’d rather never get to hold Puck’s hand again, let alone maybe—she blushes, does not think the word  _ hug _ let alone  _ kiss _ —anyway, she’d rather never get to touch him again than have to live in a world where she’d destroyed him.

He gives her a crooked grin that she can  _ tell _ is fake at her hesitation, says, “It’s fine. I just thought—”

“No!” she rushes. “That’s not—I just—I—last time—” she shoots her eyes over to Mirror and Atticus, who aren’t who they were anymore.

“Oh,” Puck says, and he pulls his sleeve down over his hand. “How’s this?”

She takes the sleeve, allows Puck to pull her to a sitting position. He sits next to her, not quite touching, though as they breathe, the cloth of her coat brushes against his sweatshirt.

“When I felt what you were doing,” he says, “I though that maybe if you fixed it, I’d go back to normal.”

“Oh,” Sabrina says. “Sorry.”

“No,” he says. “I was… I was sad about it. I didn’t want to lose… y’know.”

“Yeah,” she says, because she does.

He holds his hand out, no sleeve covering it. “Can we… I dunno, see?” he asks. “Just like. One finger, and if it doesn’t work, then I’ll just pull back?”

“I—” Sabrina says. She wants to,  _ oh _ she wants to. She wants to be able to hold his hand, feel him solid against her. But if she takes away—what if she takes something crucial?

“You’re gonna have to do it someday,” Puck says. “I’d rather know now before it happens on accident because you trip or something.”

And yeah, that makes sense.

“Okay,” she says. And she pulls her sleeves back from her hands, and reaches out a single finger, presses it against his palm.

She can feel it, running underneath everything. Can feel  _ Puck _ , all the things that make him  _ him _ , all the memories and energies and emotions, just under the surface. She’s always been able to feel them, she realizes. Running just under the skin, a murmur against her. It wasn’t you love and sparks flying when they held hands, it was  _ him _ , brushing up against her mind.

And she doesn’t have to take it away, if she doesn’t want to.

She looks into Puck’s eyes, meets his grin with her own.

* * *

In the end, some of them choose to move on. A lot of them do, honestly. There’s all this talk of waiting long enough and “the next thing” and so on and so forth. Whole families ask one or another of the Grimms to be there for one last goodbye.

The first time Sabrina is personally asked to do one of these, she almost doesn’t go. It’s not like they need her there for anything but the last bit anyway, she tells Granny. Granny says that it’s not about needing a Grimm to be able to talk to your family, it’s about the ceremony of it. The last rites. And there has always been a Grimm to do last rites in Ferryport Landing. There will probably still be one, even now that people can cross over.

So Sabrina goes. She helps Natalie say goodbye to her mother. Her father hasn’t been invited. Sabrina thinks about asking why she doesn’t want to take the chance to stay. She hasn’t been a ghost for that long. It’s a second chance at life, isn’t it? For a kid who died too young? Bella and Toby are staying, after all.

She doesn’t ask. It’s not her job to ask. It’s her job to stand witness, and she has learned how to do that.

Natalie says goodbye to her mother, tells her she loves her, and then turns to Sabrina. “I’m ready,” she says.

“Right,” Sabrina says, and she does Natalie the courtesy of looking into her eyes. This is a girl who has tried to kill her. But this is also a girl who has hurt in much the same way Sabrina has hurt, a girl who still bears the brunt of that last terrible hurt from a teacher who was supposed to help her, in the warping of her face. A girl who died far too young. A girl who lingered on without the opportunity to grow up. A girl who will not have any of the opportunities Sabrina will have. Who will never drive a car or outgrow her parents or get a tattoo or decide whether or not she likes beer or get to hold hands with someone she loves. And Sabrina will get to do these things. Sabrina will be here when Natalie is gone.

And that’s what being a Grimm means, isn’t it? It’s not about being able to talk down angry ghosts or give comfort to the grieving. It’s not vengeance. It’s about looking at someone who is dead and knowing that you have to keep living for them. About knowing that you owe it to them to appreciate what you still have.

And it is about letting them go.

So Sabrina grabs Natalie’s hands, keeps staring her in the eyes, and says, “I release you.”

There’s no body, thankfully. Whatever it was that made Natalie solid again, it takes care of the cleanup just as easily. Natalie turns into a swirl of glittering dust, and she whirls once around Sabrina, once around her mother, and once around the room. And then she’s gone.

And Sabrina is alone with a woman who is crying, so she goes to hold her hands, too. Because it’s different, saying goodbye forever, when you’d gotten used to the idea that the dead would stay around.

She stays there for a long time.

* * *

This is what Grimms are, now. They’re send-offs. They’re the ones who allow you to die, when you become a revenant or a ghost. They’re the witnesses and the comfort for the bereaved and the ones who perform the last rites. They’ll probably always have to be that, for Ferryport Landing. The curse isn’t over, after all. It’s just changed.

Granny and Uncle Jake get the sort of closure they’ve been longing for since grandpa Basil died, because Sabrina is carrying around the memories of all those people the Jabberwock ate. She’s able to tell them something that sounds enough like absolution, built out of the little bit of truth about the grandfather she never met, sifted out of the memories that come out in her dreams. She can give this to a lot of the family of the Jabberwock’s victims. She can’t give it to Charming, but he seems to be satisfied with the new job of taking care of the empty vessel that used to be his brother.

Granny has adopted the strange girl in the woods. She’s a psychic, too, with a strange ability to calm people down, which explains how she was able to survive the Jabberwock on her own. The girl doesn’t speak much, and it’s weird to have her around, but she does come in handy a lot.

Sabrina is still a medium. She always will be. It’s actually just as useful now as it was before, because now she can be a letter home, if she has to be. Last wishes. Things they forgot to say, and only remembered after they moved on to the next thing. Reassurances for the living that they suddenly realized they need.

It’s harder, being the channel for this type of energy. Before, what was upsetting was the way she got shunted aside, pushed to the corners off her own soul so someone else could remember what it was like to have a body. Now, though, it’s different. The truly dead, the ones who’ve passed on? They don’t need bodies. They don’t need to remember what it was like to feel alive and solid. Now they’re strange and unknowable and every time Sabrina reaches across to touch one of them the link is hard and bright and terrible. It roars, and she has to fight to listen through the static of that vast unknowable ocean.

She copes, though. She tries not to do it often, but it’s important work, and it’s important that she know how to use it, if only to keep others from using her. Just like Daphne and her necromancy.

Daphne is quieter these days. Less exuberant. Her happiness lives inside her, but she’s trying to keep it to herself. Trying not to grow up, exactly, because she’s tried and failed to force herself into that before. But trying to be respectful, trying to understand that not everyone feels as she does. Trying to learn the kind of empathy that expands beyond her own type of people.

Puck, too, is quieter. He’s stayed, because he doesn’t have much choice. It’s life or the next thing, and who knows if poltergeists even get to go to the next thing? Nobody’s ever given them the option, before. He is, effectively, a mostly human boy, growing the way human boys do. And being made solid has made him easier for Sabrina to understand.

It’s done this, though, by filling him with the kind of sadness that hurts to look at. He pretends, still, most of the time. After all, poltergeists are born from troubled children, and he’s carried that weight for millenia. He knows how to hide his weaknesses. But even if her weren’t solid, Sabrina thinks he would still seem heavier.

She aches for him.

They play their parts of tormentor and vengeful victim, still, but it’s different, now. It’s about the ritual of it, like so many things Grimms do. About the way they can both take comfort in it, both remind themselves how to fit inside their own skins. And sometimes, they simply sit together in silence.

And one night, while they do that, Sabrina reaches across the distance between them and takes Puck’s hand.

It’s warm.


End file.
